


We Call That 'Arlathan's Revenge'

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: Body Image, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:27:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1729430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke's not as thin as he used to be. Are his fears that Fenris may no longer be attracted to him misplaced or justified? </p><p>Fortunately, Merrill picks some mushrooms that solve everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Call That 'Arlathan's Revenge'

"I'm about to starve to death."

"You keep saying that." Isabela plopped down beside the Sundermount trail and tugged off a boot. Hawke waved the rest of their group to take a break. The march down the mountain after a long, sweltering day hunting bandits had been brutal, and they still had an afternoon's hard trek before they reached Kirkwall.

To make matters worse, Hawke's stomach was eating itself.

"Listen." Hawke's belly gave a rumble that made Varric and Sebastian check for storm clouds. "Can you hear it?: _'A pox on your father's house for only grabbing two sausage this morning.'_ "

"Sweetness." Isabela shook her boot by the heel until a pebble tumbled out. "If you're about to starve to death, then I hate to see what happens when you hibernate."

Hawke pouted glumly at the gut spilling over his belt—a gut that had definitely not been there last year. He hadn't understood what the "High Town Hundred" meant before he moved until the Amell Estate and all his best pairs of leather breeches stopped fitting.

"That bad?" he whispered. Isabela rolled her eyes and yanked her boot back up her sweaty thigh.

"Not unless you've forgotten what Little Hawke looks like." She reached up and gave his belly a pinch. "I think it's cute. All that nice tummy fur to spread around." Her mouth twitched. "I'm sure Fenris thinks so, too."

Hawke's face prickled. Without turning his head, he let his eyes drift over to where Fenris leaned against a mossy tombstone, rubbing the blackened arch of his foot. Nothing had happened between them, not yet, but more and more during their reading lessons Hawke felt _something...._ a moment's eye contact held too long, an unasked question, a tension each night at the door that silently begged _stay._

 _Or,_ an evil little voice whispered. _It's all in your horny head._

It wasn't impossible, or even unlikely. Not with what happened after their last lesson. Hawke, sleepy with wine and the easy company of his friend, had not paid attention as he moved through the bedroom door and bumped hard into Fenris as the elf stepped through to show him out. There had been a moment of delicious contact, of bare forearms and closeness....until Hawke became aware of the way his soft side pudged into Fenris' narrow waist, and the way Fenris had flinched back as if struck. It was hard to say which hurt more.

Hawke could hardly blame the reaction. He was still quick as a cat with a knife strike like a rattlesnake, but his svelte frame had buttered outward with the slow, inexorable swell of soft living and three square meals a day. He'd done his best to cover it with billowy tunics, to never tilt his head down around company so they couldn't see his neck swallow his chin, but that brush against Fenris confirmed what Hawke was desperately running out of ways to hide: that he'd become a fat, indolent noble in High Town, dining on sweet meats nightly while his friends politely waved off handouts and went to bed with malnourished bellies. The thought disgusted him.

And, from the way Fenris wrenched away from him, it disgusted him too.

Hawke sighed. He would gladly continue sitting across the long, lonely table from Fenris for all reading lessons for the rest of his life, just to be near him and watch his lips part as he read, if only for what he felt the night Fenris told him of an far off island covered in fog. A feeling like a hummingbird in his chest....and a vice squeezing his balls.

And, of course, Fenris looked up at that exact moment Little Hawke decided to make an appearance against his breeches. Hawke blushed and spun around to adjust himself. 

Isabela chuckled. "Just try not to squash him when you finally pounce." She winked. "All those little elf bones...."

"What about elf bones?" Merrill emerged from the bushes behind them. "I told you not to disturb the graves."

"It's nothing, kitten." Isabela stood up and swept a hand across Merrill's braids, making the girl swat them back into place. "We were just-" 

Hawke stomach roared loud enough to turn their heads.

"Deciding who to eat first."

"Well then that's no decision at all," said Merrill. "Fenris and Sebastian are too skinny and I'm barely a mouthful, so it would have to be between you and Varric. You have more meat on your um, rear, but Varric is rounder and would probably fit better on a spit."

"You've thought about this, haven't you?" said Hawke.

"And you don't?" said Isabela.

"It's really hard to tell with you two sometimes." Hawke's stomach gurgled. He gave Merrill his best wincing smile. "You wouldn't happen to have anything non-flesh related to eat would you?" he asked, feeling horrible.

"Oh, no, I thought we'd only be out for the day." Merrill frowned at Sebastian as he poked a stone cairn with his bow. "But I do know where to find some."

"What's this about grub?" Varrick looked up from where he was massacring an ant bed with his boot.

"You too?" said Hawke.

"About to gnaw my chest hair off," muttered Varrick, and sidled over to them. Sebastian gave up his idle vandalism of ancient elvish relics and followed.

"Given the miles left in our journey, rations would be appreciated," he said.

"Here." Merrill waved them over. They pushed through the bushes to a small clearing where a ring of fat mushrooms grew in a dense patch of grass so green it was almost blue in the shade. Merrill swept a hand under her robe and squatted inside the circle.

"These are _very_ filling." Merrill plucked four soft white caps from their brown pods with an expert twist of her wrist. She stood and handed out the meaty mushrooms. Varrick, Sebastian and Hawke each took a handful. After a moment, Isabela shrugged and tossed one back as well.

Hawke chewed the spongy cap and stem, surprised as he swallowed how it seemed to expand his stomach almost instantly. He felt better already. From the expressions on his friends' faces, so did they. Soon they were each snapping off their own mushrooms from the grass while Merrill beamed down at them.

"Now all we need is some sausage..." It was then that Hawke noticed Fenris seated on the tombstone with his arms folded, watching the road. He waved a mushroom at him. "Oy! Come graze with the herd!

Fenris rocked off the tombstone with a shake of his head and waded through the bushes. He jerked up at the rings of mushrooms in the grass, a little knot forming between his brows.

"Try one!" said Merrill cheerfully, before Hawke could offer. Fenris leaned away from her outstretched hand as if she offered him poison....or as if Merrill herself was poison.

"Do you really think it wise to eat something she picked off the ground?" Fenris asked no one in particular.

"I used to live on this mountain, you know," said Merrill stiffly.

"Oooooo, I can feel a little tingling in my everything," said Isabela, holding out her arms.

 _That_ did nothing for the shape of Fenris's upper lip. Hawke was standing close enough, however, to hear his stomach lurch, and felt a twinge for how gaunt Fenris was. For all his hard muscle and brute strength, the elf was like a ruined courser that for years had been run too hard too long and grown to like the taste of hunger. His stupid heart aching, Hawke stepped closer and held out a mushroom.

"It would make the hike down easier...." _Please._ Hawke offered a little smile, the same one he gave to stray dogs and terrified children and Fenris in general whenever he tried to grant him anything other than a wide berth. Fenris's brows un-knit. He reached for the mushroom and brushed Hawke's thick finger....

Then pulled his hand back as if burned.

"I'll pass...for now. Hawke." Then without another word he pushed back through the bushes to stand apart from the group.

"That kid gets any skinnier the only thing the slavers will have to do is put him on a string and fly him back to Tevinter on a kite." Varric popped another cap.

"Being with others is still difficult for him." Sebastian swallowed his last mushroom with a saintly shake of his head. "From what he's told me of his background-"

"Told you?" Hawke's head snapped around. "When?"

"We get together a few times a month." Sebastian leaned away in confusion from the intensity of the question. "To talk."

All the heat bled out of Hawke's face. Why hadn't Fenris ever mentioned these little meetings? He had always thought, deep down, that Fenris only invited him to the mansion....

Hawke narrowed his eyes. He suddenly saw the Prince of Starkhaven in sharp relief: the shadowed cheekbones like scars across his face, the athletic hunter's frame. Sebastian Vael was a wild hart of a man, powerful and sinewy, nothing in his body given to waste or sloth. The kind of man a warrior like Fenris could admire.

The mushroom snapped in Hawke's hand.

"Uhhhh." Sebastian turned his infuriatingly sparkling eyes back to Merrill. "But I'm sure he'll come around eventually. Once he's more acclimated to social settings."

 _Stupid selfless bastard._ Hawke quickly squatted and began tearing up mushrooms by the handful.

"You're all incredibly dense," said Isabela.

Hawke barely heard her. The locust hum of the mountainside tuned out all noise as he buckled down and did what he increasingly found himself doing when he got bored or stressed or depressed—eat. And eat. And eat _more_ mushrooms, until he heard a throat clear and looked up to find his friends waiting for him beside the road with him still rooting in the grass like a pig. He picked a few more and fell into step beside Merrill at the front of the group, refreshed... 

...and heartsick as Fenris drifted to the back of the line with Sebastian.

 _Flames, he is repulsed by me._ And how could Hawke blame him? The rubbery wobble and press of his flesh beneath so many layers of armor was all the evidence he needed as to why Fenris could no longer stomach casual contact with him, even after so many years of little touches and flirtations. Come to think of it, the shift had happened around the same time Sebastian joined the group.... 

"Thanks for that, Merrill," he forced himself to say, as much to distract himself from the ache in his throat as because he meant it. He held a mushroom up to the blistering sun. "You never mentioned what they're called."

"Milk caps." Merrill gave him a kittenish tilt her head and smiled. "Merethari and I used to pick them with me when we first arrived here. They're like eating little pillows. And they're so delicious!"

~

“….or was it mud caps that were delicious and milk caps that were poison,” said Merrill an hour later. “Uh-oh.”

“'Uh-oh' doesn’t begin to cover it, witch!” Fenris stood in the middle of a circle of pale, moaning companions. Varric collapsed against a boulder with a fist smashed to his gut. Isabela fell on hands and knees in the grass and belched.

"Cunting cunt _cunt._ " She scraped her tongue across her teeth. "It's oysters all over again."

"I'm so sorry!" Merrill reached for Sebastian as he clawed past her for a thicket. A moment later he dove headfirst into their leaves with a high anguished cry. "I didn't, I thought—" 

Hawke clutched a tree trunk and gasped. He couldn't remember ever being in this much pain. It felt like the blood was ballooning inside his head, his eyes bursting with lights and knives stabbing his gut. Worse, he felt a rush of green fire licking down his bowels....

"Oh sweet Maker." Hawke staggered through the bushes, stumbling the last few feet before collapsing into a creek bed on his hands and knees. Shaking, trembling, waves of hot and cold sweat breaking down his back, he pulled his feet under him and unbuckled his belt. No sooner had he tugged his breeches over his arse did he hear a sputter and grabbed the branches around him for dear life.

It was all he could do not to pass out. The stream just kept coming, green spatters and gurgles and sprays of what felt like dragon fire splattering all over the backs of his thighs and boots. He barely choked down a whimper as he struggled not to gag on the smell.

_Andraste's salty tits, that's got to be Lady Elegant's wedding cake from two years ago._

Up the hill, the bush Sebastian was in began to rustle violently and Hawke heard the Prince of Starkhaven sobbing and praying followed by what sounded like the un-damming of the Waking Sea.

 _Serves you right, grabby pretty boy,_ he thought.

Right before another wave hit him. 

_Kill me._ He was not a suicidal man, not by a long shot, but it was hard to deny the appeal at the moment. _On second thought, kill Merrill._

"Hawke?

Hawke gasped so hard his pucker clamped shut. _No no no no no no-_

"D-Don't come back here!" Hawke frantically began ripping leaves off the bushes. He could hear Fenris parting branches not ten feet away, his bare footfalls thudding through the toes of Hawke's boots.

"Everyone is ill," said Fenris, still advancing slowly, inexplicably towards Hawke's voice. "Everyone except myself and the mage, of course."

Oh, Hawke could hear the eyeroll in that. He imagined Fenris pinching the bridge of his nose while Merrill sobbed into her hands in the clearing, the sounds of nightmarish intestinal holocaust surrounding them on all sides.

"Nothing to worry about!" Hawke spread a handful of leaves across his palm and reached back, already wincing before he even touched the accursed, burning plains of his arse that would have given the Korcari Wilds during the Blight something to complain about. He barely bit back a scream as he wiped himself. "Just.... _stop moving_."

"We're out in the open." The sound of Fenris navigating the bushes was unnervingly close. "It's too dangerous to stay spread thin like this."

"I appreciate the tactical advice." Hawke couldn't remember ever sounding like a penny whistle before. "But there's really nothing I can do about it right now." 

"If you would allow me to help-"

"NO!"

Fenris' footsteps quieted. The silence turned on its axis from exasperated to genuinely concerned. "You swallowed more poison than the others. Let me help you, Hawke."

Hawke whimpered and flung away the dripping leaves, reaching for more even as a rush of magma twisted through his arse. He couldn't let the man he loved (loved? yes, dammit, loved) see him like this. Not when Fenris already thought he was a disgusting blubber beast instead of the suave, disciplined rogue he deserved....not when he desperately hoped he might still groom himself into something Fenris might want.

Something better than the man with his ass on fire.

"Trot off!" Hawke couldn't restrain the irritation in his voice. "Go make sure Sebastian hasn't martyred himself."

"You needn't be ashamed-"

"I said leave me alone, dammit!"

A longer, sadder silence, one whose meaning filled Hawke impossibly with more despair. He heard Fenris sigh, then the bushes rustle as he departed, gravel hissing down the hill as he made his way back to the clearing.

Hawke could barely blink back the tears. As if this day could not get worse, he'd just yelled at the man he wanted more than anyone in the world to get lost like a dumb animal. One more reason to murder Merrill.

Giving up on the leaves, Hawke waddled with his ass pointed out and his trousers around his ankles to the trickling creek, where he turned, whimpering with pain, and squatted down until his cheeks touched the water, and let out a sigh. It didn't matter that gnats were now crawling up his streaming armpits or drinking from his nostrils, or that his boots were ankle deep in mud, he couldn't bear the thought of touching himself again raw. It was the best he could do, and he hung his head down between his knees, soaked, stinking, but for a moment at peace.

A scream split the day.

Hawke's head snapped up. Isabela? That was not a sickness scream, that was.....For a beat all he could hear was blood thundering in his ears.

Then he saw the wave of giant spiders scrambling down the hill toward him.

"Oh, fuck the Free Marches." Hawke let out a sob. Ripping his knives from their sheathes he staggered up, pants still tangled around his ankles as a spider big as a horse reared back on its four hind legs and bared its dripping fangs like hatchets at him. Hawke parried its bite with a knife cut, waddling back, sobbing harder as he fell backwards into a warm creek of diarrhea and mosquito muck.

 _This is how I die._ He could scarcely believe it. He'd survived the Blight, the Deep Roads, and this was how it ended: trousers down, acid spewing from his backdoor, crying because his cranky boyfriend thought he was fat. Somehow the giant spider part didn't seem unbelievable.

He punched a spider and kicked another, a third scurrying over him like a prickly blanket with its fangs peeled back. He prepared for the deadly bite-when a sword ran it through.

Spider guts sprayed hot and foul across his face. A moment later a giant sword heaved around and slung the spider off like a trebuchet, hurtling it down the hill.

"Fenris!"

The elf's brands ignited with a clap of cold fire. He raked a glowing claw through a spider's head, tearing out viscera and slinging it in the eyes of the next one that came thundering at him, then sent four of its legs spinning into the sky with an upward slash of his blade. The sides of his chest inflated in a roar as he cut down another spider, then another, grabbing a hairy tarantula leg in one fist before driving his sword up its belly and kicking its body back into the next wave.

 _Sweet Maker, I need that elf cock._ Hawke lay frozen until the last of the spiders was slain, their twitching, bleeding bodies littered all around them. Fenris, guzzling air through his nose like a bulldog, spun around to him.

"Are you injured?" He offered a bloody hand and hauled Hawke to his feet.

"I....I'm fine, thanks." It felt as if a fever had broke and passed. Hawke blinked slowly, coming to his senses. "The others. Are they-"

"Are you all right down there, boys?" Isabela called down to them from the clearing. She sounded like a wrung out towel, but Hawke was glad to hear her voice.

"Still breathing!" Hawke licked his lips, his own voice a tired, shrunken thing inside him. "Is everyone okay?"

"Define 'okay.'" Varric's shout curdled into a groan. Distantly, Merrill could still be heard babbling apologies and Sebastian still babbling the Chant.

"It would be best for us to get off this mountain side. I should give you a moment." Fenris started to pull away.

Hawke redoubled his grip and yanked him back. "I don't want a moment." Maker, he must be delusional. Fenris was covered in spider guts, Hawke was covered in lunch, but they were standing close enough for Hawke's bare thigh to brush Fenris' and a jolt leap through both of them.

It was the most disgusting erotic moment of Hawke's life.

"What....what would you have of me, then?" asked Fenris, his voice caught in a no man's land between disbelief and terror. The claws of his gauntlet dug into the flesh of Hawke's arm.

 _A lifetime,_ Hawke ached to say, but the moment was too fragile for that. "First I need to know."

"What are you-"

"Are you disgusted by me?"

"I....what?!" From the horror that passed over Fenris' face, Hawke might as well have suggested he was secretly a giant hairy spider in disguise.

"It's just that this-" Hawke pointed down at himself. "Wasn't here last year."

Fenris stared blatantly at Hawke's cock.

"No, shit." Hawke slapped his forehead. "What I meant was, I'm not as fit as I used to be."

"Our previous engagement aside, I had not noticed a dip in your effectiveness."

"That's not...." Hawke sighed. He squeezed a flap of his hairy gut and wobbled it.

"Ah." It was Fenris' turn to be embarrassed. "That had not escaped my notice."

"And you don't find it repulsive?" _Don't you want a prince instead of a fat apostate' son?_ "That in one year I've gone from a dashing thief in the night to a man who can barely fit through a window?"

"You are either too hard on yourself or do not understand the definition of 'dashing,'" muttered Fenris. "Now you simply have a shape that befits your station. Despite it, you've maintained your character and skill, unlike the majority of your class."

"Sebastian is part of my class and doesn't look like me."

"He has proved himself a reliable ally, the same as you."

"Is that all I am?"

"You have always been..." Fenris throat pulsed. For a moment he looked as desperately hunted as Hawke had ever seen him, then sharpened his expression into a glare. "Is there a point to all this?"

"I just need to know if you still find me, you know..." Hawke swallowed. " _Sexy._ "

Fenris cursed explosively in Arcanum. "You're asking that here? Now?!"

"I did almost get eaten by a spider."

Fenris gave a "pah" and threw his his free gauntlet in the air with such pitiless disdain that Hawke felt a coil of heat twist around his groin. If not for the remarkably stinky circumstances, something other than Hawke's thigh might have brushed against the elf.

" _Festis bei umo canavarum,_ the only thing you deserve to be called right now is a fool." The agitation in his face smoothed slightly. "Is this about the night I bumped into you?"

Hawke nodded sheepishly, though he was secretly pleased that Fenris had also been turning the same moment over in his head, too.

"This....is best saved for another time," said Fenris, lowering his voice and gaze to the gravel. "But you should know, Hawke, it was not my intention to offend. Whatever you feel about your shape, it has not changed what I think of you. Things are simply...."

He grasped helplessly at the air then let his arm fall to his side. His face snapped shut like a window, in one instant gone from open frustration to hard silence, back into his shell where Hawke could not follow.

But he did not let go of Hawke's hand.

"I'd like to hear about it, then," said Hawke softly. "Tonight even, if you'll have me."

Fenris lifted his eyes. There was an unmistakable curiosity there....until a raised brow ruined it. "After a bath, of course?"

"Or a couple." A gush of warmth against his pucker gave him an ominous twinge. "Or, you know, tomorrow night. Once my backside has had a chance to recover.

The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Fenris' lip curled. He sniffed the air and stepped back out of the green film standing on top of the creek water, muck sucking at his bare feet. His hand slipped free of Hawke's, and for a moment, just a moment, Hawke's heart followed after it, desperately hanging in the open-

"Give yourself a proper scrub," muttered Fenris, wiping his feet on the grass and starting back up the hill. Then he paused, and threw back a suggestive arch of his eyebrow. "You'll need it."

Hawke stood there covered in filth and watched him go. He could scarcely believe it. Either Fenris was Kirkwall's greatest actor or he truly didn't care that Hawke no longer had the washboard stomach from the night they first met in the Alienage. There was no denying Hawke was fat....or at least _fatter_ , but it had not doused for a moment the fire that had steadily, painstakingly, kindled between them these past few years. Fenris wanted him. Probably. Maybe. In any case, Hawke wanted to sing. And cry. And maybe pull his pants up.

"I could kiss Merrill for this," he murmured dreamily.

His stomach gurgled.

"After I bloody kill her."


End file.
